Anything look different? The old default is still available here, if you’re curious.

Text is finally dark on a light background. I was even having trouble reading the white–on–blue text of the last design, and that was one of the main driving forces behind this one. Let this be a word of advice: if you’re designing for large areas of text, always always always use a light background and dark type. Always.

You might notice a horizontal scrollbar. I’ve scrapped any semblance of catering to 800x600, so this is now a ‘best viewed at 1024’ site. I think designing for 800x600 is pointless anyway, since most people run their browser windowed rather than full–screen even at that small size. Since I’m not selling anything and I don’t have quotas to hit, I can afford to stop catering to the absolute lowest common denominator and take a step or two up the ladder.

I’ve also abandoned CSS positioning for now and went back to tables. The main reason for it isn’t a lack of faith in the former, more a sense of familiarity with the latter. This was a really complex design to build, and I made the decision from the start to just skip the headache.

Mezzoblue now has a logo of sorts. It’s more effective as displayed in the bottom right corner, but I’m still not entirely sure about this particular pattern. I’ve been playing around with a variant which may find their way up here. “evil octopus” is what I’m calling the idea, if that helps any.

Regrettably, I’ve had to change from .html to .asp extensions on archive files. Any links to existing archives are now broken, but this shouldn’t be a huge problem because I haven’t seen any referrals to them yet anyway.

Anyway, there isn’t really any new content yet, but I think the organization of existing content is going to be far easier to manage. I’m also using Blue Spark for smaller content updates, so it will most likely start improving as I work out the kinks.

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You are reading “Redesign Soft Launch”, an entry posted on 9 February, 2003, to the Pedestrian Street collection. See other posts in this collection.